The emergence of COVID-19 variants of concern and the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in Canada will continue to influence the course of the pandemic in Canada and worldwide. Statistics Canada will provide timely information on a regular basis on excess deaths, causes of death and comorbidities as it becomes available.
To understand both the direct and indirect consequences of the pandemic, it is important to measure excess mortality, which occurs when there are more deaths than expected in a given period. It should be noted that, even without a pandemic, there is always some year-to-year variation in the number of people who die in a given week. This means that the number of expected deaths should fall within a certain range of values. There is evidence of excess mortality when weekly deaths are consistently higher than the expected number, but especially when they exceed the range of what is expected over several consecutive weeks.
From March 2020 to the beginning of September 2021, there were an estimated 20,994 excess deaths in Canada, or 5.0% more deaths than what would be expected were there no pandemic, after accounting for changes in the population, such as aging. Over this same period, 26,065 deaths were directly attributed to COVID-19.
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